effecting change.

Shiite vs Sunni? Who's the bad guy?

Let no one misunderstand - the war we currently fight is against radical, militant islam. Our government won’t admit that at the executive level, but that doesn’t change the facts on the ground.

In the Muslim world, much of the violence that takes place is due to clashes between Shiites and the other major sect, the Sunni. The differences go back to a dispute over who was in charge of the Muslim faith after Muhammad died 632 years after Jesus, God’s Son, walked the earth.

That’s an oversimplification, but the Sunnis thought the new leader should be elected, and Shiites thought the leadership should stay within the family of Muhammad. The Sunnis, a larger faction, won the day, and the Prophet Muhammad’s close friend and adviser, Abu Bakr, became the first HMIC, the Head-Muslim-in-Charge.

Officially, they called him their caliph and he ruled as sort of a head of state over the caliphate, the name for a Muslim state run by one religious leader. Since then the Shiites have fought the Sunnis for control because they don’t recognize the authority of the elected Muslim leaders—who for the most part have been Sunnis. That explains why, in a very oversimplified way, religious violence erupts regularly around the world, as each group attempts to seize control from the other . . . in this peaceful religion.

More recently, since 1979 there have been no direct diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran; the relationship had been tense since the overthrow of the shah during the Iranian Revolution when the fundamentalist mullahs came to power, beginning an era of Shiite Islamic revolt that would spread across the Middle east.The Iranians, intent on establishing a pretext for cracking down on internal dissent, thundered about the arrogance of Americans as they attempted to perpetuate a transformation that would lead to the global domination of Islam and its values. We became the villains, the facilitators of the shah’s greed, and the demon behind every problem in the region, according to the clerics running Iran.

So when the shah fled to the United States, allegedly for cancer treatment, they took over our embassy, thinking we’d return him to Iran. We didn’t and they kept our people for 444 days, releasing them on President Reagan’s inauguration day in 1980.

Iranians have since established, funded, trained, and armed Shiite terrorist groups such as the Hizbollah Brigades, Islamic Jihad in Lebanon, and the League of the Righteous. While the Sunni have sponsored al-Qa’ida and ISIS/ISIL in Syria and Iraq. Let no one misunderstand - the war we currently fight is against radical, militant islam. Our government won’t admit that at the executive level, but that doesn’t change the facts on the ground.